Beautiful losers

It’s a hard time to be a revolutionary in America. The Communist Party lives on mostly in the curses of the right, new left utopianism has largely shriveled into paeans to diversity and a fondness for Ralph Nader, and the only visible anarchists dress up in black bandannas to fight police and trash the local Starbucks. In postmodern culture, “radicalism” has become little more than a fashion statement of prosperous avant-gardists who disdain political rhetoric. Maybe it’s time to revive the Industrial Workers of the World.

Hold that smirk. The IWW, at its height just before World War I, signed up tens of thousands of blue-collar Americans with the promise that they could, as member Ralph Chaplin wrote in the great labor hymn, “bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.” Wobblies (a nickname of obscure origin) occupied the lowest rungs of the workforce: harvest hands, lumberjacks, textile workers, stevedores, denizens of hobo jungles and flophouses. But they had a rough idea how class salvation should come about -- and it didn’t involve politicians, guns or check-writing liberals. With frequent strikes and constant agitation, the IWW would gradually persuade wage-earners of every race and nation to stop competing against one another and join the “One Big Union.” Then, some glorious day, the workers would usher their bosses out the door, assume ownership of every factory and office and run the economy for the benefit of all.

The Wobblies ambled toward the Day of Judgment with a joke on their lips and a melody in their hearts. They spiced up their propaganda with cartoons about a self-deceiving worker named “Mr. Block” and clever takeoffs on corporate ads and government recruiting posters. Unique in the history of the left, the IWW sold more copies of its songbook -- palm-sized, with a cover of blazing crimson -- than anything else the union ever published.

Inevitably, the only Wobbly still famous today was an itinerant songwriter and illustrator who died in his mid-30s at the hands of a firing squad. It’s impossible to know whether Joe Hill actually murdered a Salt Lake City grocer and his son, crimes for which he was executed in 1915. But thanks to a knack for epigrams, a gauntly handsome face and a catchy postmortem tribute, he almost does seem “alive as you and me” -- or at least as vital as any radical martyr can be.

In “Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture,” Franklin Rosemont seems to have hunted down every available detail of Hill’s short life and abiding legend. He takes special pleasure in describing his hero’s brief combat in the Mexican Revolution and in debunking the prosecution’s case against him. But he’s hardly content to write a mere biography about the Swedish-born adventurer, particularly since several good ones already exist. Rosemont wants the organization he joined back in 1962 to finally receive its due -- not merely from scholars on the left but from anyone who desires a noncapitalist future.

To that end, he makes a claim that overwhelms his ambition. The IWW, Rosemont declares, was the unsung inspiration for many of the cultural rebels who rollicked through the 20th century. The “wacky characters” and “no-holds-barred black humor” in IWW songs broke with sentimental tradition and anticipated the Surrealists. The earthy slang in Joe Hill’s lyrics and those by his fellow Wobblies did much to shape the brash modernism of Carl Sandburg and then of Allen Ginsberg. The cult of the radical hobo gave life to some of Jack Kerouac’s more compelling characters, while the IWW’s love of “wild nature” suffuses Gary Snyder’s poems. On occasion, Marcel Duchamp “spoke like a true Wobbly,” and Jackson Pollock’s dad was “at the very least a vigorous supporter.” And did you know that Joe Hill was an excellent Chinese cook, at a time when most Americans thought chopsticks were an instrument of the Yellow Peril?

With contemporary labor on the ropes, it’s pleasant to think of the IWW as “the hippest union in the world.” Although Rosemont’s manic search for links to the broader counterculture is easy to ridicule, he’s surely not crazy. The lasting celebrity of Joe Hill indicates a yearning for a kind of cowboy Marxism that seems more authentically American than the academic sort. The Wobblies also did the future a great service when they abandoned the pieties of the ever-earnest left. My students still chuckle at songs like “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” (“Oh, I like my boss,/He’s a good friend of mine,/That’s why I’m starving/Out on the breadline”) and Hill’s “The Preacher and the Slave”: “Work and pray, live on hay,/You’ll get pie in the sky when you die/(That’s a lie).” By contrast, the clanking rhetoric of “The Internationale” just makes them gag. But Rosemont wrongly assumes that witty iconoclasm was a sufficient spur to union power.

Indeed, the Wobblies must be regarded as a group of beautiful losers. IWW organizers, a handful of whom wrote decent poetry, led big, brave strikes of polyglot workers no other union had reached. Abjuring any truce in the class war, they then refused to sign contracts or build durable locals, and their beachheads of militancy soon disappeared. When Woodrow Wilson pulled the nation into the Great War, the Wobblies kept organizing strikes and denouncing “the capitalist state.” By 1920, government raids and trials had shut down their offices and put most of their leaders in jail or driven them into exile. Almost 20 years later, two Communists wrote the song that begins, “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night.” Ironically, they belonged to a party bent on smashing the free-thinking, undisciplined ways of rebels like the man they eulogized.

Rosemont tries to make defeat sound romantic. So what if the IWW built no stable institutions? “The state, military apparatus, churches, business, police, prisons, political parties, Boy Scouts, television, and organized crime are ‘stable’ to a degree, but are they doing anybody except the billionaire capitalists any good?” Better to cultivate “the fine art of rising to the occasion” and exploit an “inexhaustible bag of tricks” than to fret about the weakness of the AFL-CIO or any other working-class body that cuts boring deals with the bosses. That blithe vision played to a limited audience even in the IWW’s heyday, and it would be no more popular today. The Wobblies’ creed was always strongest among single men -- like Joe Hill, who took his anger and whimsy with him wherever he roamed. Rosemont ignores the bulk of wage-earners, unionized or not, who prize security -- for themselves and the larger community -- more than the freedom to defy the boss whenever and however they please. Women and men who worry about keeping a job, paying the bills and securing their homes and cars against thievery seldom regard class agitation as a “radically and self-consciously unfinished” work of art.

Still, Rosemont’s childish politics don’t quite tarnish the sparkle of his research. He has spent decades accumulating the lore of his beloved union, and the passionate, bric-a-brac quality of the collection has its own charms. Dip into one section and you are immersed in plot summaries of what may be every published novel that featured a Wobbly character. Leaf through another and you will learn about a Finnish American radical with the nom de guerre of T-Bone Slim. T-Bone stuffed his regular columns in the IWW press with clever neologisms -- “civilinsanity,” “perhapsbyterian,” “oleogarchy” (for oil barons) -- and such items as a precise computation of how many pancakes it would take to carpet the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The unheralded father of this mode of folklore is Archie Green, to whom Rosemont dedicates his tome. Green is a former shipwright and radical academic whose books tell one vivid story after another about the culture of working Americans. The latest is “Tin Men,” a gorgeously illustrated study of the metal sculptures created by tinkers, mechanics and building tradesmen through the centuries. Unlike Rosemont, Green never shoulders aside the yarns and memories of his subjects to harangue readers about the sins of existing unions or the perfidies of bosses. Labor lore is a democratic genre and one must be true to its spirit. Alas, most of this literature is securely confined to the past. If American unions are to rise again, their partisans will have to nurture a culture as original as that of the Wobblies’ and, one hopes, more durable. Immigrant workers will probably take the lead, just as they did a century ago. Already, their soccer chants, class-aware theology, protest songs and cartoons depicting labor wars in their homelands may surpass the creativity of Joe Hill and T-Bone Slim. But who will craft their story for contemporary Americans, who indulge in a mass culture that dwells as little as possible on their jobs?

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From Joe Hill

From the start, the IWW refused to sign contracts with employers, and scorned pensions, insurance, and death benefits as pitiable concessions to a decaying social order.

In writing about the IWW the key words are always freedom, solidarity, democracy, direct action, revolution, rank-and-file control, humor, imagination, and “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All!”